Poppy Seed Balls

Mohnkugeln

Monja Art

An old man lives alone anywhere in nowhere in Lower Austria. His sister comes to see him once in a week. Therefore she has to walk two hours because no bus goes there. It doesn't take much to be happy.

An individualistic approach to images and sound shapes this experimental Heimatfilm.

Background

This documentary came into being within the scope of the Film Academy study. We got 240 meters 16mm film material (about 22 film minutes) and a Bolex. Monja Art visited several times with the protagonist and talked to him. After this Caroline Bobek and Monja Art shot this documentary within two days. The result is a 20 minutes long documentary. The used film material is almost 100 percent of the total material.

The car, bouncing over the bumpy road, turns into the driveway of a remote farmhouse inhabited by an old man. A woman’s voice informs us that in the old days poor labourers used to give their infants a tea made from poppy seeds to ensure they slept soundly in their baskets at the edge of the field. They simply accepted that the children would suffer the consequences of this later in life. The elderly farmer has led a simple yet tough existence. He had to help his parents in the field from a very young age. “You have to work as hard as you can,” he says in his cheerful Lower Austrian accent. And whether or not you die on the job is up to God.
Once a week his sister embarks on the hourlong march to his house to bring meals she has prepared and packaged for him. She then stands by the stove with the dog, watching the man blithely gobble down his food. The mood of this very rural scene is enhanced by the grainy quality of the 16mm film, sudden overexposures and abrupt reel changes. The often asynchronous soundtrack of noises and snippets of conversation dominates the shots of the brother and sister going about their business.When the camera and microphone follow the farmer up his steep meadow, the clearly audible steps of the film crew attract more attention than the man in the picture.
Monja Art’s individualistic approach to images and sound makes MOHNKUGELN, which was produced at Vienna’s Filmakademie, into an experimental Heimatfilmthat clearly implies that this farmer was probably one of those opium-quaffing kids.
Visions du Réel Nyon 2009

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